It is the earliest known harbor in the world. 2675–2545 B.C.), including the reign of Khufu. Then, in 2008, Tallet’s team relocated a previously known but little understood coastal site at Wadi el-Jarf, some 60 miles south of Ayn Sukhna, and found that it had served as a harbor for around 50 to 70 years in the 4th Dynasty (ca. The harbor at Ayn Sukhna appears to have been used intermittently for more than a millennium to access the Sinai, starting during the reign of Khafre (r. Until just over a decade ago, the earliest known Red Sea harbor was at Ayn Sukhna, which was excavated starting in 2001 by a team led by Egyptologist Pierre Tallet of the University of Paris-Sorbonne. The most efficient way to access these mines was by boat. Some copper was extracted from the Eastern Desert, between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea, but the major copper mines were across the sea in the southern portion of the Sinai Peninsula. The immense quantity of copper consumed by the construction project-not to mention the other pyramids and monumental buildings that preceded and followed it-led to an urgent search for sources of the metal. While preparing the stone blocks for use in the pyramid, workers smoothed their surfaces with copper chisels the width of an index finger. Copper saws were used to cut it, and experiments have shown that an inch of metal was lost from blades for every one to four inches of stone cut. Copper picks were used to quarry the stone. Although nowhere to be seen in the finished product, massive amounts of copper were essential to building the monument. It was composed of an astounding 91 million cubic feet of stone-roughly the amount it would take to fill a football stadium to the top tier of seats. The Great Pyramid originally measured some 481 feet tall and 755 feet on a side. They would make two or three such round trips in the next 10 days. Merer and his men settled in for a night’s sleep, after which they would head back to the quarries to pick up another load of limestone blocks. As the sun set and twilight deepened, hearth fires twinkled on land and on many of the boats. Also arriving by boat were workers from across Egypt and cattle from the Nile Delta to feed them. Nearby stood a royal palace, archives, granary, and workers’ barracks.Īfter offloading their cargo, the men anchored their boat in the lake alongside dozens-if not hundreds-of other boats and barges that had brought a variety of materials necessary to complete construction of the pyramid complex: granite beams from Aswan, gypsum and basalt from the Fayum, and timber from Lebanon. When the pharaoh died, his body would be taken to the valley temple and then carried to the pyramid for burial. At the edge of the water, perched on a massive limestone foundation, loomed Khufu’s valley temple, known as Ankhu Khufu, or Khufu Lives, which was connected to the pyramid by a half-mile-long causeway. 2633–2605 B.C.), the pyramid would have been essentially complete, encased in gleaming white limestone blocks of the sort the boat carried. This lake was part of a network of artificial waterways and canals that had been dredged to allow boats to bring supplies right up to the plateau’s edge.Īs the boatmen approached their docking station, they could see Khufu’s Great Pyramid, called Akhet Khufu, or the Horizon of Khufu, soaring into the sky. Under the direction of their overseer, known as Inspector Merer, the team steered the boat west toward the plateau, passing through a gateway between a pair of raised mounds called the Ro-She Khufu, the Entrance to the Lake of Khufu. The vessel, whose prow was emblazoned with a uraeus, the stylized image of an upright cobra worn by pharaohs as a head ornament, was laden with large limestone blocks being transported from the Tura quarries on the eastern side of the Nile. On a summer afternoon around 4,600 years ago, near the end of the reign of the pharaoh Khufu, a boat crewed by some 40 workers headed downstream on the Nile toward the Giza Plateau.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |